The Cerebral Mum

I mentioned in my first history tutorial notes over in my egregiously behind study blog that I didn’t find the small group discussions very productive, but when I finally went again last week (I’ve missed tutorials due tothe ovarian cyst), I was expecting something a little better than what I got. Yes, we were put into small groups again and, not knowing anyone, I just joined those I was closest to.

We were given questions to discuss. Did anyone talk about them? Not at all. Even when the tutor sat with us they didn’t stay on topic. It was so bloody annoying that I eventually got up and moved to another group. (Way to make friends, eh? Chalk me down as another obnoxious mature-age student.) The second group were not talking about history either, but at least they were discussing another university subject and not football.

For philosophy I have only missed one class and that tutorial is fairly quiet as well. I have to give them credit though, because Plato is pretty difficult to engage with as well as being somewhat daunting. I’m think that when we start on Nietzsche next week, they’ll have more than can relate to and more will be said.

But this brings me back to my sexism. I’ve actually spent some time talking to my female tutors and I like and respect them both but while we (okay, it’s only me) are in sexual stereotyping mode I’ll just say that there is one teaching style I like which seems to be fairly rare amongst the women: The Martinet.

I like The Martinet. He gets down to business. He knows that you’re in class for one reason and one reason only. He expects you to talk, and he expects you to do your reading. And so you do. Because if you don’t, you look like a dick.(If you can’t imagine the kind of person I mean, think of The Nazi on Grey’s Anatomy and remember me kindly because I have provided a female, though fictitious, example.)

Captain Slusher, an old teacher of mine that I’ve mentioned before, was a perfect Martinet. He came into class for the very first time, towering over us all, and gave us a lecture about his expectations; about what he would and would not tolerate, about what constituted an excuse and what did not. It’s pretty hard (for me, anyway) to dislike someone who is up front about where he stands and then applies those principles; who is hard but fair. And it has the added benefit that when you’ve done well, you know that you have done really well.

Perhaps that is a weakness on my part - wanting an external impetus - but I like to be pushed. If I can just breeze through a subject with high marks, I guess that’s okay, but I’d prefer to be stretched. I like having to earn every last percentage point.

Incidentally, I have only received one mark so far, for a 500 word answer to a weekly question for philosophy. I only wrote 350 words and I thought my answer was fairly shite. I got 95%. Don’t get me wrong: I was really chuffed (and surprised) by that and I probably did a happy dance for two days straight. It was the first mark I’d received in over a decade. Who wouldn’t be chuffed?

But I’m looking forward to getting marked harder and getting whipped into shape as expectations rise over the course of my degree. (Don’t throw that in my face if I don’t get an HD for my first history essay next week. Just let me cry.)

And I’ve been wondering… What will I be like when I start teaching? Will I be a soft touch? Or will I try out The Martinet style and have it come across as though I have some repressed, chip-on-my-shoulder issue with my womanhood. (Another pretty awful stereotype.) Because, you see, the beauty of Captain Slusher was not only that he was uncompromising in his standards; he was also bloody funny.

And I’m not. Funny, I mean. I’m too serious, too intense, too everything. And my sense of humour is obscure and personal. Whatever game face I decide to go with, it’s going to need a lot of work.

[Btw, there was an interesting review of the movie Smart People which discusses the stereotypes of academics. I might be biased, because I have a blog crush on Jake Pure Pedantry but it’s worth a read. It might even be worth watching the movie. ]

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I forgot. Big Sis reminded me mid-morning. I said…

“Huh?”

Yup. My birthday is huge event.

I’ll probably get a couple of emails or IMs to remind me again later. With a small family spread out all over the the country and the world, celebrations are all a little flat and I can’t really get excited about it. That’s not a complaint in any way. I’m just not enthused. Is that normal? Is there an age when you’ve just had enough birthdays for them to be something of a farce? Or do some people still get a buzz from all the fuss and personal attention?

Is there an age when there is no longer any fuss and personal attention, and it just becomes a polite exercise?

Wow, this sounds dreary. I don’t mean it to. Woo-hoo! I’m 35! Nope, can’t do it. It’s just another number. I’m really looking forward to Caspar’s birthdays when he is old enough to enjoy them. (And when I don’t freak out about the whole thing like last year.) I’m looking forward to making the whole day an event, to making them memorable and special and filled with fun and love. So perhaps birthdays are for children and there is a time “to put away childish things”.

My birthday? Meh.

Having said that, though, I do love other people’s birthdays. I like buying presents and going to parties and making a fuss, so maybe when I am living back in town and can see whatever friends I have left who are still hanging on to threads of relationships stretched by inaccessibility, I’ll find the fun again.

Until then… Happy Birthday To Me. On a day just like any other day.

Seriously, is this normal or sad?

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What a difference a (night) makes!  I honestly can’t believe it.  This morning I woke at my usual time (I’ve been well trained by my human alarm) to silence.  Cas was awake when I went in to pick him up, standing and waiting, but perfectly happy.  And I was happy. 

Because I wasn’t woken up by god-awful screeching.

You guys were such a great help and I can’t believe this idea had never occurred to me.  I was completely trapped in this "impossible" mindset.  But I did something even more radical than putting a camping mattress in the lounge.  I broke down the bed altogether and cleared the room.  This doesn’t just solve my sleep problem: It solves the major problem of mess.

The house has been full of half packed boxes, lining the hallway and cluttering up the living space.  Trying to clear it up with Cas running around a pulling everything out of boxes has been a Sisyphean task, always depressingly one step forward and two steps back.  Cas is a fantastic, easy boy but I’m pretty sure I’m not alone in the experience of cleaning everything up only to have the place looking like a disaster area again not an hour later.

Now the boxes and things to be sorted out are stacked neatly against the wall in the bedroom, where I can close the door.  It’s not entirely sorted out yet but I feel like I’m getting somewhere.  Who knows, I might escape the suburbs after all.

Today, I even had the opportunity to take an afternoon nap.  Big Sis was out with the boyfriend, and the mattress was lying there waiting for me.  I didn’t use it: I got caught up in some of the usual Internet things.  But I could have and that was a really nice feeling.

I still have a sleep deficit and I won’t be out of the red any time soon.  By about 5pm I was tired and cranky, and then of course wide awake and passed the point of sleep by the time Caspar went to bed.

But I don’t feel hopeless anymore and I don’t feel trapped by the situation.  Such an easy fix. So here’s to another good night’s sleep!

(Whenever I decide to go to bed.)

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At the moment, I have the house to myself. Big Sis is away camping with her B and his kids and I was really looking forward to the time alone to get the house in order, among other things. The mini heatwave put paid to that idea for a couple of days because all I could do was sit with my feet in a bucket of water and sigh. During that time, Cas learned what dunking is and he enjoys it immensely.

I think I mentioned on the post I wrote when it was too hot for me to fill in the title field that I’ve been giving him a big bowl of water to play with. I put my head in it once to dampen my hair and he thought that was extremely funny. He then spent as long as he could (ie; the short length of time I indulged his 1 year old sense of humour) pushing my head back under.

But I digress. Today, the weather was perfect and I got a few dishes washed and took the recycling out but something else is interfering with my productivity. You see, the neighbour’s kids are here.

It is guaranteed when he has them, my door will be knocked on at least four times a day because one or both of them wants to hang out with me. (I really don’t understand the attraction. At first I thought it was Caspar, but apparently it’s me.) After turning them away several times yesterday I promised the youngest last night that I would make some time for her today.

At the first early morning knock I let her know that we could go to the park together at a particular time in the afternoon. Three knocks later I caved and got Cas all sunscreened and ready to go.

This isn’t an eventful post. Nor was it an eventful day. The weather was perfect, sunny with a cool breeze, and she was happy enough to tag along with me to the local shops because I needed milk. Without Big Sis’ car available, that takes over an hour or all by itself. Then we played in the park, something Cas seems to enjoy more and more everyday.

And now the day is over. But I have this simple post written and those few dishes done. That’s something.

I might just give myself the night off, not worry about the forum, not worry about reading all my feeds which have exploded once again, not worrying about tweaking every little this and that both here and on the other blog. (Yes, I just told you where it was.) I might just manage to do those things in my own time, without making them a source of pressure.

There just comes a point when you have to let everything go, mentally at least, in order to become productive again. It really isn’t that I have too much to do. Like most things, it’s how I think about it.

Tonight whatever I get done will be a walk in the park.

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So, I’ve had a cup of coffee and read my morning feeds and now, just for today, I’m making the rule that I will not come back to the computer at all until Cas is in bed for the evening.  It’s sunny out.  Today is external work day.  I will get some things done.  I don’t know how much, but I’ll try to differentiate between the physical exhaustion and the mental exhaustion.  That is so much harder than it seems.  It is amazing the impact of your psyche on your physiology.  I will push through, I will take breaks.  But I want one small thing done every hour.  And then I shall come back here for my reward.

That is my plan for today.  Not for the next week, not for the next month, just for today.  Anything else is too much for me to imagine.

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A while ago, for the 30 Poems in 30 days challenge, I wrote a poem critical of Robert Frost’s A Minor Bird…

I do not need
to speak of birds
I can say the word
Depression. _{A Minor Depression}

So here’s the word: I am depressed.

I mean “clinically” depressed: I have all the symptoms. Constant and complete exhaustion, physical aches, headaches, no will, no confidence, no pleasure, inability to concentrate, inability to sleep, a sense of being overwhelmed, a nebulous sense of guilt, and no sense of myself as a person. So I’ve said the word. It’s long overdue, but I’ve said it.

The first thing I want to say about this is that this has absolutely and categorically nothing to do with becoming a mother. Motherhood has not effected my sleep or my energy levels, it has not challenged my identity or made me lose perspective, it has not restricted my freedom or challenged my confidence. If anything, it has been a boon in every respect. But it has also forced me to slow down, to stop pushing my body to its limits in terms of hunger, thirst and sleeplessness, to stop filling my life with so much work and responsibility that there was never time to think or breathe, all in order to avoid my state of mind.

Why do I want to make that clear? Because I think there is a very real problem with our current social narrative about motherhood. I think that it is negative, and I do not want to be associated with it in any way. I do not want to give tacit support to it and I do not want people to assume that I am evidence of it. Because for all the very real women about there with very real problems, like post natal depression, there are dozens of self-aggrandizing women ignorantly promoting their narcissistic-martyr-complexes-with-a-twist-of-consumerism as the quintessential, modern day truth about motherhood, instead of what it really is - a sly imitation of age old stereotypes, hidden amongst words and ideas which were once a powerful call for change but have now been perverted for the same old purpose: Maintaining the status quo. If these women like their status quo, that’s their damage. But I don’t like the way that it is peddled, and I don’t want to be perceived as part of it.

Leading up to taking a week off, I started so many posts about things which are going on in the world, about societal problems, about philosophical problems, about other people’s problems. (A post entitled Motherhood is the easy part… was one of them.) I struggled with my writing, I laboured for the right words. I finished none of them. I posted none of them. I truly believe that words are the only thing that has ever changed the world - and there is so much that needs changing - but it slowly dawned on me as I wrote that I do not have the emotional resources to be a voice right now. It slowly dawned on me that this was yet another pressure I was adding to my life to distract me from what I really need to do.

Physician, heal thyself.

So healing myself is what I am going to do right now, before I again take the burdens of the world on my shoulders. Voices are clearer when we are standing on rocks than when we are sinking in quicksand. I have healed myself before, and I can do it again. But this is what is going to happen:

This blog is going to literally be my journal: The place where I spew my stream of consciousness writing, my dreams, my unleashed emotions, all of my mess. It will be uncensored, possibly unintelligible. I will post what I post, when I post. My guess is that I will probably post a lot. In the past, trying to come to terms with the things inside of me, my best and most powerful tool has been to let them out. I don’t know if I really remember how to do that, but it is a place to start. I will not only be “thinking my way back to myself” but writing my way back to myself.

I don’t have the luxury to release all the fucked up shit inside my head in my daily life. I have to throw balls to a beautiful boy who cannot catch them, and teach him that the triangle goes in the triangle shaped hole. I have to prepare three meals a day and peel bananas and mandarins I do not eat. I have to go to the park and run baths and wash nappies. So this blog will be my luxury. For the time being, it will be written solely for me.

Everyone is welcome to stick around, welcome to comment, but I won’t be offended if you don’t want to. I will probably say vicious, nasty things. I will probably be cruel and unkind, especially to me. I will probably go off on tangents. I will ramble about symbols in a language made of pictures. I will say things that are “wrong” and I will not explain myself. I will dig around in the archives of my history looking for breadcrumbs. I might do weird exercises. I might write in the second person. Or the third person. There will be no structure, no conclusions. There will be posts without narrative or opinion. I probably will not make sense.

So this post is the warning sign at the beginning of a journey. I don’t know how long that journey will take, or where it will take me. I don’t know what monsters are in my closet, or what beasts will block my path. I do not know what I will see when I look in the mirror.

All hope abandon ye who enter here. _{dante alighieri}

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30 poems in 30 days. A simple enough task. It is now Day 22 and I have written only 10 poems for the project. I have never been very good at finishing things. I am a great procrastinator. Take for example my novel and this painful confession:

I began it in 1994.

Even allowing for 3 computer disasters (which left me computerless for roughly 5 of those 13 years), a lost manuscript (recovered after 7 torturous months) and a ritual burning of about 200 pages (somewhere around the turn of the century), it is a fairly unimpressive effort. At the moment I could not even tell you what state it is in. I hadn’t finished word processing the copious notebooks and scrap paper I filled with my insane scrawls during the penultimate computer crash before the last one occurred.

And then I got pregnant.

I worked my butt off during my pregnancy to save as much money as I could before entering the realm of single motherhood and have not touched my novel since. And I won’t. Work will not begin again until Cas and I have moved back into the city and I am no longer in the in-between. My rough estimate is that about 60% of it is written but it will require some major structural editing as I have been writing it disjointedly for years.

When it does get published, we’ll just avoid mentioning the year 1994 to the critics. Marcel Proust I am not.

But back to that original thought I haven’t yet finished. I am 12 poems behind with only 8 days left. Even excusing myself for the days I was hanging over the toilet bowl as though I were in my first trimester, that too is a fairly unimpressive effort. I’m not being hard on myself. It’s just a fact.

So do I try and catch up? Do I give up? Do I let it go and finish each assignment at my leisure?

I would like to finish the 30 poems in the allotted time; because I chose to participate; because it is hard; because leaving everything to the last minute, until it seems everything is about to implode, is no longer a habit that works for me.

I am a mother.

I used to thrive under pressure; write papers which earned High Distinctions on the night before they were due, work 17 hour shifts on two hours sleep and then go back for more, frantically fill page after page until I was dizzy from the pace of it and I could no longer see. It’s not that I don’t have the stamina any more: I never had it. It’s because I don’t have the drug.

Adrenaline.

I was an adrenaline junkie. Life just pushed so hard that there was never a chance to be tired, and if it didn’t push me hard enough, I made it. I ran on my second wind for years and I loved it. Motherhood has its own hormonal highs but it is nothing like that rush of blood to the head. Motherhood is not strenuous. It is neither a sprint or a marathon. Motherhood is a slow shift.

I was about to launch into a long paragraph about how working in hospitality is like being a rock star but that would be another digression. Let’s just say that it is driving, physical work and it has it’s own momentum. It generates energy and you feed off it. You get caned all night then you clean up and hang out, drinking and smoking and seeing who can tell the most scurrilous stories about the guests.

But the slow shifts - the ones where you’ve polished every bottle, restocked every fridge and wiped every surface twice - those shifts are the killers. Your body isn’t pumping sugars to your brain and you have time to think. Usually, I would think about all the other things I could be doing if I wasn’t trapped in that bar or restaurant, standing at attention like a palace guard. I would be annoyed by the lack of customers, and then annoyed when a customer interrupted whatever boondoggly task I’d found to do.

Babies aren’t very demanding. Their needs are simple, they sleep a lot, their movements are limited and they are easily amused. But in that first year we have to stand at attention constantly and all the things that used to get done in large blocks of time have to get done in pieces. We cannot let the house go to wrack and ruin while we play at whatever is more interesting and then tidy it in a frenzy all in one day. We can’t immerse ourselves in a book and read it cover to cover. Babies’ needs are too constant and not constant enough. There is too little to do but you aren’t free to go and do something else.

This manic insomniac who burnt the candle at both ends until she crashed and and then lit the next one with glee needs to find new ways to get things done. There is not enough pressure but there is no valve to release what is there if it builds up. You can’t put babies on hold. You can’t call in sick. You can’t take a mental health day. You can’t just say, Stuff it - I’m going to the beach.

So I will try and get my poems done but in all likelihood some won’t make it within the 30 days. I’m trying to realign the way my energy works with the requirements of my new life (which I love!) but it is a trial and error process and I don’t have the answers yet.

I do know, however, that it hasn’t done me in!

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